And then he’s outside, breathing the dirty air of Poolbeg Street, brackish odour of the quays.

As if Ivan feels inside himself a moving force, coming from inside himself but directed outward, wanting to find a home for itself elsewhere.

Master’s tools and the master’s house, what would Bourdieu have to say.

That God in his unknowable wisdom and mercy has left him this much. The cool touch of her hand at his face. The flash of chewing gum, the black tights. His mother, his brother, safe and well. Cold wet windswept streets. Books he hasn’t read yet. Opening theme of the Concerto No. 24. His friends, students, colleagues, their kindly and familiar

She offered him friendship, a kind of friendship, yes, but he needed more. Or perhaps she offered him more, screened behind a veil of friendship, and he tore at that veil, foolishly, frantically, believing he could get to her.

It is the same, himself, his own intelligence, his personhood. And for this he feels a tender wounding gratitude, a sense of blessing, that he exists simply in this body, in this mind, that he is himself, this one person, rich in priceless resources which to his conscious mind remain almost infinitely unknown.

No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word.

These are the right kinds of things for him to think about at this moment: precise things, tangible, replete with sensory detail.

panic attack or am I dying how to tell.